The Widening Gyre
by Rosmarinus
Summary: In the course of a year, the team has fallen apart. A reflection on Season 3.
1. Default Chapter

_Disclaimer:_ _My best friend is a lawyer and says I need to tell you that Horatio and and the members of his team and all references to events in CSI: Miami are not mine, no matter how much I want Horatio to be mine. I am making no profit on this (see the sad state of my students loans and you'll believe me) and certainly no copyright infringement is intended. Also, "The Second Coming" was written by W.B. Yates and is used as the setting for this fic. I make no claim of ownership of this moving poem._

_Spoilers: The entire third season. In fact, it's necessary to have seen the season to understand this._

_Author's note: The writers have worked very hard to take the team apart this season. I can only implore them to fix this next season. Just compare the closing scenes of last season's finale with this season's and you will understand my frustration._

The Widening Gyre

_Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;   
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  
The best lack all convictions, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity. _

_WG_

_  
Surely some revelation is at hand;  
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi  
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  
The darkness drops again; but now I know  
That twenty centuries of stony sleep  
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? _

**The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats**

_WG_

_Turning and turning in the widening gyre._ Someone in high school made me memorize that poem. I thought it was a stupid poem then – but over the years it has come back to haunt me. It was a riddle, a message I could someday puzzle out. But I never did. Until I lay on the floor of the jewelry store as Horatio leaned above me. Then all I could do was watch from wherever it is that I can watch. It is true, I saw them live the threads of the puzzle, but instead of tying all the lines together, it led them each their own way, out of the center. _The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere; The ceremony of innocence is drowned._

Damn. It wasn't supposed to be this way.


	2. Turning and Turning

Calleigh stood, stone-faced in shock, as Horatio handed her Tim's and his guns. Death surrounded her everyday; violent, senseless death. Murder and accident that tore people away, sometimes torn them apart. This, this was not the same. This time, death had grabbed at someone she loved.

"Speed, ah – Speed might have had to check his gun," she heard Horatio say. Calleigh nodded, expressionless. If she let Horatio see how she felt, Calleigh knew that she wouldn't be able to contain it. She would fall, also, to the floor.

Tim lay there, under Alexx's gentle hands, far too still. A single tear hung on the medical examiner's cheek. "Baby," Alex whispered, so softly no one heard her. "How did this happen to you?"

Rick Stetler entered the jewelry store. He saw Horatio nod to Calleigh, who gave him a hate-filled look and stormed out. Horatio watched her go, hands in his pockets. Stetler thought the lieutenant looked for a moment like a lost boy. Then he turned and his face changed, from pain to anger as he saw the internal affairs officer.

The attendants with Alexx loaded Speedle's body on the gurney and closed the bag. The rough noise of the zipper was the only sound in the shop. Stetler watched as the gurney was wheeled away. Alexx paused to squeeze Horatio's arm, and she left.

Stetler hated his job. He hated the moment when he turned to Horatio and asked for the guns. Horatio answered, in clip tones, "See Calleigh." He had seen Calleigh, saw her teetering on the edge of emotional collapse as she walked to CSI 2. He saw Horatio in a moment of unguarded grief. He saw Alexx stop in the pitiless sunlight beyond the doors and wipe at her face.

Stetler had seen this before. There was nothing he could do for them, other than his job. This team was so tight that they lived within each others' lives. Now, they would be one short, and the center would not hold.

Rick shook his head sadly, taking Horatio's anger calmly. He knew what was going to happen and could do nothing for them.

_-WG-_

"I can take care of myself!" Calleigh lashed at Eric. "You didn't need to do that. You undermined me."

Eric stared at her in shock. He couldn't believe it, Calleigh had never spoken to him with that tone of indignation. "I was trying to help!" he retorted. "That guy is over six feet tall and he was trying to threaten you!"

"And what could he do to me, Eric?" Calleigh demanded, frustration in her voice. "We were standing in front of evidence lock-up. I carry a gun. Let me try to threaten me; we are following procedure."

Eric shook his head, a knot of emotions roiling his stomach. He had happened on Middlebrook demanding evidence from Calleigh. The man's voice and body language were hostile and he clearly thought he could bully the diminutive blonde woman in front of him into giving in to his demands. Eric pursed his lips, unable to tell his partner how the protective instinct in him reared up to defend her.

Calleigh didn't want defense. All she wanted was to do her job. Lately, it felt like that was all she had. But she saw the concern and the contriteness in Eric's eyes, too.

"I'm sorry," Eric told her.

"So am I," she replied.

_-WG-_

"I don't need any more friends," Alexx snapped harshly at Ryan. She knelt over Donny Lopez's body, examining him.

Ryan grimaced at her words and took a step back, hands in his pockets. Of all the members of his new team, Alexx had been the most distant, ignoring him in the hallways and talking to Eric or Calleigh as if he wasn't even in the room. Calleigh has said that Alexx was still hurting from Speedle's murder, but Ryan could see that they all were, even the lieutenant. No one laughed, no one joked. Valera had said he would like working with Caine's team, that they were all really tight and looked after one another. If they were, Ryan thought, he couldn't see it.

He tried again. "There's a knife missing from the butcher block in the kitchen," he said, trying to sound helpful.

Alexx twisted from her place by the body and gave him an appraising look. "You might have cracked the case," she said, her voice snide.

Ryan threw up his hands. "I'm not trying to take Speedle's place," he exclaimed. "I'm sorry he's dead!"

With that, Ryan stomped away, looking for evidence. "I'm just trying to do a good job," he said to no one in particular."

Alexx turned back to Lopez's body. She took a deep breath and wondered if she had been too sharp with the boy, he was only learning his job. Alexx knew she couldn't help it right then – it was too soon. Too soon for another person to have Tim's place in her world. Clearing away her tools, she mentally corrected herself. No one would ever have Tim's place, but this boy still had a job to do.

Maybe she could work on being nicer to him, she thought.


	3. The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Ryan saw the mischievous look exchanged between Delko and Calleigh and had an incredible sinking feeling. They were doing it again, he thought. With as nonchalant a shrug as he could muster, he left the two in the lab and headed to autopsy.

Alexx was waiting for him. She raised an eyebrow when he entered and told him to check on the body. Ryan did so, pulling back the sheet.

The sinking feeling went all the way to the floor.

"Alexx," he asked nervously, "where did the head go?"

Two floors above him, Calleigh and Eric laughed, for what seemed like the first time in months. Calleigh sat down at the table and leaned back against Eric, enjoying the closeness of his body.

"Tim would be so proud," she told him, still giggling.

Eric shook his head with a grin, remembering his own hazing at Speed's hands. "I could have killed him that day he made me observe the headless autopsy," he said, laughing.

Calleigh quieted and sat up, moving away from Eric. "Yeah," she said, her voice suddenly empty.

Eric rested his hand on her shoulder, the lightness gone.

_-WG-_

Horatio watched Morgan leave. The sunlight continued to stream threw the glass walls of the atrium and Horatio could see the Miami skyline.

"Addicts fool everyone, but mostly themselves." His words rung in his own ears. He had said it once before, to Raymond, when he begged his brother to leave narcotics. Yelina and Ray Jr. needed him, Horatio had said. I need my brother, he had added.

Raymond reassured him nothing would happen. _Let me finish this one case_, Raymond had promised. And Horatio couldn't change his brother's mind.

Madison slept in her hospital bed. Horatio stood up to stretch, smiling at the tiny angel. The cancer had made his niece weak, but hopefully, with the transfusion from Ray Jr., she would begin to recover.

Horatio placed his hand on her red curls. This child could really be his, with the freckles and matching hair. But she was Raymond's, not his. Of all the things his brother had done wrong, maybe this little girl could be the right thing. Horatio felt in a totally new way how to love a child and considered again what he needed to do to become Madison's legal father and help Suzie to raise her.

He glanced at his watch and absently thought he had spent a great deal of time out of the office, still cleaning up Raymond's messes. Horatio wondered for a moment how his team was doing back at the lab.

_-WG-_

"He what!" Eric slammed the locker shut. Calleigh stood to the side of the bench, arms folded as Eric angrily toweled off his hair. "That little prick! He went to Horatio with my evidence after I had been swimming around the bottom of that marina. And he thinks he can take the credit for it?"

Calleigh shared Eric's glower. "I thought you should know. I don't know if he thinks he's getting back at us for the headless body or what, but he's ignoring me when I tell him he has to work with us."

"Well, I can see that," Eric said, pulling on his shirt. "What did H have to say about it?"

Calleigh made another face. "'Nice work.' I'm not even sure Horatio noticed."

Eric ran his hand through his hair and decided it was short enough that he didn't need to brush it. "That's another thing," Eric said. "Where is H? Even when he's here, it's like he's not here anymore."

Calleigh sat down on the bench and stared at the lockers, her eyes flitting past the one locker without a name plate. "I don't know. I heard his daughter is sick."

Eric snorted. Calleigh looked up at him, puzzled. "That little girl might be sick, but I don't think she's H's." He watched Calleigh tilt her head and added, "How long ago was it that Raymond Caine was killed?"


	4. Things Fall Apart

Calleigh looked around the open room of the bar. Instead of tables, it had beds with mesh curtains. "What will they think of next," she muttered to herself and set about examining the bed where their vic had been killed. _Convenient place to have sex_, she thought.

_Toothing_. Calleigh tried to ignore the thought. Sure, she wouldn't judge, just tell him to be careful, to use "protection." She turned over the pillow and noted the make-up stains on it.

_He can fuck a stranger_, she thought angrily, _but not tell me what's going on in his head_. Calleigh sat back for a moment, giving into the frustration. He was supposed to be her best friend. But more and more, it seemed that he was a stranger to her. She couldn't stop him as Eric pulled away. _And now he has random hooks but won't come over to watch a movie anymore_.

It hurt more than she was going to let him or anyone else know. Calleigh had gotten good at hiding her feelings since September. So had Eric.

_-WG-_

Valera sat at the end of the pier, watching the waves rolling beneath her feet. She was tossed from her own lab for one teensy little mistake. They were rechecking her work even as she sat there, watching the sky and the ocean grow dark. And Lt. Caine – he had just stood there while the district attorney ripped into her like that. It was like he didn't even know her anymore.

She started to cry. How could this be happening? It didn't make sense. This would never have happened before. But there was no way she could stop it now.

There were foot steps approaching. Valera looked up to see _him_, Ryan, walking towards her. What the hell was he doing here? Didn't he know this was all his fault?

Ryan stood beside her for a moment, hands in his pockets, watching Valera's cold back. Silently, he sat down beside her as darkness dropped over the ocean.

_-WG-_

"Is Raymond alive?" Horatio asked Keaton. Hope and fear warred within him but he kept his voice steady.

Keaton sat on the motorcycle and looked away before answering. "Yeah," he said.

Horatio watched his brother's killer – or not his killer – ride away. Raymond was alive. He could do nothing for Speed, but maybe, maybe, he could help his brother.

The smiling image of Yelina flitted past his minds eye, accompanied as always by his love for her. Horatio let that feeling fill him and then he clamped it down, rolled it up and tucked it away. Raymond was alive and Yelina was his brother's wife.


	5. The Center Cannot Hold

It's not the EDAX machine's fault. It simply scanned what was given to it and produced a result that said "colbalt." It couldn't help itself that it hadn't been there for Tim Speedle during the original case. It couldn't help that Tim was dead, that his friends would one moment confide their trust to one another and then the next act like nothing mattered between them. It wasn't the EDAX's choice to hire Ryan.

_Fine_, Ryan thought angrily after informing Delko that he wasn't trying to "out do" the dead man. Calleigh had said the same thing not two hours earlier. _I have other friends, and they appreciate me_.

But Ryan still blamed the EDAX machine.

_-WG-_

Eric held his hands up with the evidence bag, a look of shock on his face. Wild-eyed, Calleigh stood in front of him, gun trained directly at his heart. For the space of a heartbeat, Eric thought she had finally lost it and that he was about to join Speed.

"Calleigh!" he called. "Put the gun down!"

She lowered her weapon and seemed to come back to herself a little more. "Did you see anyone?" she demanded. "Was anyone else here?"

"No, Calleigh," Eric told her. "There's no one else here."

Calleigh slid her gun away, but didn't take her hand from it. She studied Eric as if for the first time. "You wouldn't draw a gun on me, would you?" she asked.

Something inside Eric felt as if it were dying. How could she ask him that? Didn't she know he could never, ever hurt her?

What had happened to the time when she _did_ know that?

_-WG-_

"How does a man leave his wife and son and let them believe he's dead?" Horatio demanded of his brother. "I begged you not to work narcotics."

Raymond stood there and took the brunt of his brother's fury. Some part of him had thought Horatio would be glad to see him, would embrace him like when they were kids. Would welcome him home.

But Horatio's first concern was not for Raymond. It was that Raymond had hurt Yelina. He wanted to protest, to tell Horatio that he had no choice, and he did. But Horatio turned a deaf ear to his argument.

"Big brother always knows best, still?" Raymond finally retorted.

"Ray Jr. is missing," Horatio said. "And it's because of you."

_I will take back my family_, Raymond thought but nodded contritely to Horatio. "So, what's the plan?"

_-WG-_

Eric and Calleigh watched in disgust as the on-air reporter, Erica Sikes, reported that Miami-Dade Police had uncovered a plot to spread a dirty bomb. Ryan walked into the A.V. lab and glanced at the monitor-turned-television.

_Shit_, he thought.

The other two members of the lab turned from the newscast to his arrival.

"I didn't mean it," he said at last.

They glanced at one another and walked out, leaving him alone with the news.

_-WG-_

_She could do this_, Calleigh again reminded herself. Until a drop of John's blood fell from the ceiling and landed on her white lab coat. She stared at it numbly. John's blood. The same color as Tim's blood.

Carefully, she lowered the test pistol and took the cartridge out. She laid the pistol and the cartridge on the counter at the firing range and set her yellow safety goggles beside them. She stepped away and shrugged off her lab coat, hanging it on the peg beside the door as she passed.

_-WG-_

Eric finished changing for the day, his eyes trained on the small screen in the corner of the locker room. He stormed out before he could hear Ryan tell Sikes that the credit belonged to his co-workers, who save many lives that day.

As he left the building, all Eric could think, that while he stood there as Horatio diffused the bomb, was that Ryan had been safely tucked in at the lab. He didn't want credit, Eric thought as he walked alone to his car, all he wanted was to do his job and that kid would never be Speedle.

_-WG-_

Calleigh stepped into the elevator, her name plate in her hands, and refused to think about tomorrow. She was alone now.

_-WG-_

Horatio put on his sunglasses as the plane pulled away; the plane carrying his family, his brother. Carrying Yelina, who was never his to begin with. He was alone, without his family and without his team.

Somewhere in the dusk, as the plane became airborne and passed overhead, he remembered words from a poem his mother had liked. He never understood it, but they oddly made sense now.

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last," he softly repeated, "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

_-WG-_

_Author's note: I don't normally write by borrowing so heavily from the series for lines and action, but I woke up Tuesday morning and a master's degree of rhetoric collided with my favorite show. The **Second Coming** seemed to describe the events of this past season and so I felt the need to share. If you can't figure out who I see as the "center" and the "beast," please let me know and I'll be happy to explain. Thank you for indulging me in this part fic, part plea to the series writers to fix what they have done to our favorite characters._


End file.
